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February 15: Home Stretch
Apologies, but though this piece was written on February 15th, technology conspired to keep it from appearing until February 24th… -ctan It has been a long, cold offseason, but this year I’ve done everything in my power to try to stave off the pangs of withdrawal. There’s still a few weeks before exhibition games begin,…
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February 8 2001 : Book Review Round Up of OffSeason Reading
Between all the books I got on baseball for Christmas, and the many books I collected throughout the season in anticipation of a long, cold winter, I had quite a reading list waiting for me when the season ended. Unfortunately for me, despite the size of the stockpile, I’m out of books to read and…
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February 6 2001: It’s All Mental
Absolutely every damn thing reminds me of baseball. It’s snowing like the proverbial “dickens” today, soggy, thick, and wet–it looks like there’s a man throwing lumps of wet chicken feathers off my roof. But that reminds me of throwing, and therefore baseball. I just baked chocolate chip cookies, which is a typical winter thing to…
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February 3 2001 : Think Back to May 28 : The Duel
Uncountable acres have been deforested to print all that has been written regarding one of the greatest rivalries in sports history, the New York Yankees versus the Boston Red Sox. Fortunately, with publishing in the electronic medium, no more trees need share that fate in order for me to chronicle the historic meeting that took…
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December 23 2000 : Think Back to April 23rd…
Home runs in the Toronto SkyDome have become increasingly frequent in the “juiced ball” (and/or juiced player) era, with 58 round-trippers hit in just the first 14 games there in 2000. On Easter Sunday, 2000, when the New York Yankees took on their division rivals, the Blue Jays, eight balls would fly into the seats….
Why I Like Baseball
AN ONLINE JOURNAL OF BASEBALL ENTHUSIASM, by CECILIA TAN
Welcome to “Why I Like Baseball”
“Why I Like Baseball” is the one of the oldest baseball blogs on the Internet, dating back to before the word “blog” existed. (I think it’s slightly older than Jay Jaffe’s “Futility Infielder,” and was slightly preceded by Geoff Young’s “Ducksnorts.”) I first hand-coded the site in HTML 1.0 at some point in 1998-99. (Most of the pre-2000 content has been lost to bit rot.) I had been away from baseball for much of my adult life, but the McGwire-Sosa home run race caught my attention I was underemployed at the time, had just published my first book of short stories with a major publisher, and was taking freelance writing gigs as I could find them, but what I really wanted to write about was baseball. So I took it upon myself to create a website. Back then, the Internet was smaller and less populated, and I soon discovered my little passion project was being read by folks like the editors of ESPN: The Magazine, who published a surprise shout-out to me. My writings eventually led to me writing a book on the Yankees, editing the Yankees Annual, writing for Gotham Baseball, and at one point even creating online content directly for the Yankees themselves.
Cecilia Tan
Writer